Maxime Verner, 26, an entrepreneur, is one of France’s youngest politicians. The son of a taxi driver and a homemaker, he grew up in the suburbs of Lyon. He is a graduate of The Sorbonne’s prestigious political-science program and has been president of the Association of French Youth since 2009. He lives in Paris with his wife.

I was at a party when I got a text from a friend that there were attacks going on in Paris. All seven of us at the party started to get out our cellphones to figure out what was going on. We just started frantically searching Facebook and Twitter. Every few minutes, someone would get a text about a friend, an acquaintance, someone we knew from school who was safe or missing.

I have a couple of friends who were at Bataclan, and they survived.

Many of my friends know people who died. And not just one person, but two or three people who died. Unlike the Charlie Hebdo massacre in January, the target of these attacks was young, progressive people like us. That’s why they hit the restaurants, the bar, the concert, the soccer stadium. We were the target.

I grew up with these kinds of guys — disaffected French kids who were all going to Syria, maybe to become jihadists. Maybe I even know some of them.

We drove home after the party on Friday night, and as we drove, I felt that every centimeter, every millimeter of Paris was now at war. People are missing limbs, they are disfigured, some will not survive. It’s shocking. We are in shock. The fact is that no one could have imagined this: coordinated attacks in our city by seven kamikaze.

The city government has forbidden people to go out to participate in vigils, but people are going anyway. They are going to say that we are not afraid and that we survived. Grocery stores and restaurants are open in Paris, but everything else — museums, concert halls — is closed. Many people are inviting tourists to their homes for dinner because they have nowhere to go in Paris.

We are very grateful to US citizens for their compassion, but now we need more help, and a strong, coordinated will and a coalition with NATO and the world community to fight ISIS. We are a traumatized country, and this is very new to us.

I and my friends have a very bad feeling about what’s coming next, over the next week and the next month. Many fear there will be more attacks.

Things have changed so dramatically. Nobody feels secure. But we keep fighting.